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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23487025">The Face of God</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/falseknightontheroad/pseuds/falseknightontheroad'>falseknightontheroad</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hetalia: Axis Powers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate History, Alternate Universe - 1910s, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - 1930s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Les Misérables Fusion, F/M, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:27:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,933</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23487025</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/falseknightontheroad/pseuds/falseknightontheroad</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“A million people hungry, needing the fruit — and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.” — <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>, John Steinbeck</p><p>The world, as it is, is intolerable. To Yao Wang, released from nineteen years on the chain gang, a convict and a pariah. To Efrosyni Katsafanas, abandoned by her son’s father. To Alfred F. Jones, upholder above all else of the law. To Feliciano Fu Ling Wang, rescued by his adoptive father, who wants the truth about himself and the world. To Ludwig Sulzbach, struggling to see outside of his grandfather’s poisonous legacy. To Francis Bonnefoy, who sees in the city of Bendición the conditions out of which a better world can be formed. They must each answer for themselves the question: what is to be done? What are they willing to sacrifice, and what are they willing to create, for the world they long to see?</p><p>Hetalia-Les Miserables (book and musical) fusion AU, set in vaguely-parallel-historical WWI/interwar California (and Oregon) with the serial numbers filed off. Character, pairing, and tag lists will be updated when necessary.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ancient Greece/Rome (mentioned), Female France/Netherlands (Hetalia)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. (Book I: Yekateryna) no god above and hell alone below</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This started as a fill on the Hetalia Kink Meme lo these many, many years ago; this version has been updated and reposted.  Aside from Les Mis, it’ll be drawing a lot from <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i> and the weird layers of sediment in my head full of pre-1950 California labor and immigration history, and from my California nostalgia more broadly—it, like the USA in general, is a big stupid neoliberal hellscape, and I haven’t spent more than three months at a time in CA in five years, and I miss it a lot. There may or may not be a recommended-reading list at the end, should I reach it. <i>In general</i> the setting should be thought of as a parallel United States/Earth more broadly, with a lot of names changed, some exaggerations of real historical phenomena for plot reasons, and a couple instances of somewhat anachronistic attitudes towards things like “women in the clergy” or “Chinese men gaining access to mainstream local political power”, again for plot reasons. I will be yammering on in endnotes in the future about the real-life inspirations for x, y, and z, but nothing as presented in the body of the fic should be taken as representative of the actual course of a real-life historical event.</p><p>(What I’ll say now is: if you’re in high school and they are going to make you read <i>The Grapes of Wrath</i>, or you are out of high school and they made you read it and you hated it, read it before they make you do it, or go back and read it again, at your own pace and paying attention to the parts that you want to pay attention to. Like <i>Moby-Dick</i>, the only other piece of the ~classic American literary canon~ I actually think everyone should read, it is criminally underserved in the majority of high school classes in which it’s taught, and like every book ever it’s better when you’re not reading it for a grade. Also, like <i>Moby-Dick</i>, it’ll turn ya socialist! Win-win!)</p><p>There’s gonna be just a whole load of characters. I’m not tagging them unless they actually get more than one or two speaking lines over the length of the fic, to avoid getting people’s hopes up. Some of them will have had their names changed from the ones Himaruya has given or recommended, sometimes for plot reasons, sometimes for “Hima, that’s not a name” reasons. It should be overall fairly easy to pick out who’s who, but just in case, when a character whose name has been significantly altered or entirely made up is introduced, I’ll put a note at the head of the chapter.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The road to Joshua Flat pulls down from the mountains, their brush and scree, towards the immense valley, its parched and dusty surface baked nearly as white as the sun. Its dust stirs into clouds beneath the feet and wheels of sparse traffic, a single truck or wagon enough to send up a plume like a signal-fire. Equally parched crabgrass lines its edges.</p><p>This road itself has changed in the decades since these events came to pass, as the highways came later, but its surroundings have not: the little valley it travels is still surrounded by low hills burnt gold in the sun, which from afar wave as though beneath a field of grain, but on close inspection prove to be covered with short, brittle grass beneath shining waves of heat. Insects whine unseen from the grass. Between the hills, the road follows the short valley’s curve until the hills die back and the horizon stretches full of blue sky hazing around the edges of the valley’s great bowl, distant mountains faintly visible on either side.</p><p>And after the hills Joshua Flat rises from the hazy plain. It is a fairly small town, average size for the periphery of one of the massive cattle ranches that sprawls over the southern valley. Clustered around the few streets, the buildings a collection of peeling clapboard and off-white stucco, large enough for a police station and a train stop.</p><p>The road is empty, but for one man.</p><p>He is short and wiry, his long, matted black hair tied back. His clothes, which at one point had been merely nondescript, are coated in dust and grime and sweat; his battered cap is pulled low over his face to ward off at least a little of the glaring sun. White dust sticks to the cheap polish of his shoes, which are cracking and coming apart.</p><p>Behind him, as he reaches the final downslope, the mountains do not tower. They are not the majestic, craggy behemoths of the valley’s eastern edge, but instead skulk low to the ground, tan with dirt and brown-black with scrub and gray with scree, ridged and crinkled and folded with innumerable dry stream-beds cut deep into the soft rock, hovered over by thin streaks of cloud either gray with dust themselves or white and flattened. The road winds down from these sun-baked heights, smelling of aching heat and dried dust, the same smell that clings to the man.</p><p>He walks straight ahead, doggedly, tilting his head to one side to spare his eyes from the sun. There is a small, yellowing canvas pack slung across his back. His only companion is the trailing cloud of dust raised by his footsteps, and it shadows him as he lopes towards Joshua Flat with the sullen determination of the condemned.</p><p>A little after six o’clock, he makes Joshua Flat. Nobody in the town recognizes him, and he is paid the slight interest that all newcomers who don’t have the look of ranch-hands or any relatives in town receive.</p><p>He trudges into the police station, which also serves as the town hall. Five minutes after he leaves, everybody in Joshua Flat knows exactly who and what he is.</p><p>A tiny restaurant is attached to the train stop, and it is not crowded when the man enters it. A cluster of off-work ranch-hands gathers around a few tables, and flies buzz around the screen door—not too fast, even the flies slow in this heat—and a couple early moths bat at the porch light, and the cigarettes in their little cardboard boxes droop next to the hard candies all stacked in the closed display case. Smells hang heavy in the air, as yet unmoved by the desert wind: grease from the kitchen, oil, thousands of acres of dirt and cows, all moved only by the swinging shut of the door as the man steps through. He sits down heavily at the counter, and the woman behind it gives him a cool, appraising look.</p><p>He returns that look: dark eyes beneath flat lids in a sunburned, rounded face. It would be rounder, but the boniness of the man’s long, thin hands and the loose hang of his dusty clothes provide some explanation. His hair is beginning to straggle loose from the ponytail.</p><p>He catches a possible meaning of her look and, already reaching into his pocket, says “I can pay” in a somewhat high voice. He lays the evidence of his statement on the counter, the handful of greasy, crumpled bills and assorted coins.</p><p>“’S not it,” the woman says.</p><p>“Then what?” His tone of voice is modulated, soft, deferential, but the effort he is expending in keeping it that way is plainly audible.</p><p>“Out of hamburger.” She knows, and the man at the counter knows she knows, that behind her in the kitchen the cook is flipping one; the hiss of grease fills their silences.</p><p>“I’ll eat the bun.”</p><p>“Out of ’em too.”</p><p>“A glass of water, then.” His stare hasn’t left her face once, and the stares of the ranch-hands haven’t left him.</p><p>The woman folds her arms. “Look, we’re not serving you.”</p><p>“I can <em>pay</em>.”</p><p>“Yeah, with the money they give you when you left the chain gang.” The man’s fingers tense on the counter. She continues. “Heard before you came in. You’re supposed to be going to Alila, ain’t ya, so you’d better be on your way.”</p><p>One of the ranch-hands mutters “And it’s a hell of a long walk, so you’d best start soon.”</p><p>The man straightens up, shoulders stiffening. “I’ve walked twenty miles today. I’m hungry and thirsty, and I can pay.”</p><p>The woman glares. “So pay somewhere else, then, ’cause I don’t serve convicts nor parolees. Said on your papers you’re dangerous. So you get out, or I call the sheriff and he puts you back where you come from.” And she moves towards the phone hanging on the wall, infinitesimally, just enough that the man notices. She can see the retort forming behind his eyes, perhaps a question about the criminal records of anyone else in the place, and she watches it dissolve.</p><p>Without another word, the man stands, scrapes his money back into his pocket, and leaves. Flies buzz against the screen door after he shuts it; the smell of cooking grease slips out, that of sunburned grass slips in.</p><p>A few children stare at him as he makes his way down the street. One throws a pebble, experimentally, and it misses him by several feet; the man does not seem to notice. In a few of the peeling houses around him, cheap radios play garbled music, spilling into the twilight along with light from around their closed shutters or through their open windows. Oddly few open windows, for the heat of the day.</p><p>In one of the buildings, the music is a little louder, a little less distorted, and the light mixes with the smell of something frying and with voices raised in conversation. When the man enters, few people look at him. The proprietress glances up, smiles vaguely, and nods her head towards an empty chair. He sits, letting out a small sigh.</p><p>A couple minutes pass, and then a man slips in the door and speaks in hushed voices with the woman. Their conversation punctuates itself with several glances towards the seated man. Eventually the woman stands and picks her way over to him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You got to leave,” she says.</p><p>The man looks up at her, sees that she knows, and does not argue. Sullenly, he gets back to his feet, and as he leaves, the entire room turns to stare at his back.</p><p>The sun has dropped fast, and the temperature with it. His clothes, too warm for the day, are too cold for the night, and he pulls the jacket closer around himself. Joshua Flat’s houses are closed now, lights less frequent, and above it the sky stretches wide—beyond the mountains, very far, one could almost think they saw the lights from Port Heron. Above Joshua Flat, there are stars, and there is dust.</p><p>The man knows he can’t keep walking through the night, but not exactly where he is going now. Perhaps, if he found somewhere out of the way enough that he wouldn’t be picked up for a vagrant or rolled by anyone, he could sleep.</p><p>A stucco building with a lee in its external steps seems likely as any other place. The man has slept in far worse. He settles down in it, pulling the jacket up over his head.</p><p>A voice stirs him: “Sir, would you like to come in?”</p>
<hr/><p>Yekateryna Chernenko should, at this point, be introduced to the reader.</p><p>She was in no way a high-ranking member of her, or any, religious order, as they stood on Earth at least. In that county there weren’t many high-ranking anythings. In full technicality, she was not even ordained by her own denomination, having been called back to Joshua Flat before she could finish her seminary courses. But her father had preached before her, standing at the pulpit with his voice soft with reverence, and her younger brother and sister had long left the county in search of a place where the rains came.</p><p>Yekateryna had stayed. There was work to be done.</p><p>She was not a high-flown preacher; her sermons were calm and direct and delivered in a soft voice that churchgoers would sometimes have to strain to hear. They lasted only as long as she thought necessary to deliver her point. Anyone who counted the money given in collections, and then compared it with the money quietly distributed to those in need, often with the assurance to soothe wounded pride that of course it could be paid back and the knowledge that that repayment, if it came, would not often be in money, would know all they needed to of Yekateryna Chernenko.</p><p>She had worked on the ranch, growing feed, for much of her youth, alongside the men and women who were still laborers in Joshua Flat, and offered and received advice. Even as she aged, she still visited the fields, to speak to the workers when there was time and it was welcome, and to lend her hands when there was not.</p><p>Some people questioned the wisdom of allowing a woman, hands roughened by the hoe and neck burned by the sun and ash-blonde hair cut short, to preach with dust in her Sunday vestments and her eyes lightened like the hazy edges of the sky. And Yekateryna would smile, a little sadly, and ask <em>here, who else would?</em> There were some who questioned the wisdom of her living alone in the rooms attached to the church, all unlocked, and she would say not to worry, because she always had company.</p><p>Some of the older residents of Joshua Flat remembered how, when Yekateryna had been young, she had wept easily and with full conviction, and she still sometimes did. She kept deathwatches and birthwatches, and knew when a homily was and was not needed.</p><p>The only thing Yekateryna Chernenko owned of high monetary value was a silver table service, very old, of East Coast manufacture, which the Chetters had given to her after her tenth deathwatch for them. She would eat from it occasionally herself, and serve guests with it.</p><p>None of this is to imply that Yekateryna Chernenko was faultless. She was often unfairly impatient, in her mind, with some of her parishioners’ problems, she tended to wait too long to make decisions in the hope that the situation would resolve itself, she would strive for conciliation even when it was not the best outcome. All humans have faults. Yekateryna knew this, and knew what hers were, and she strove desperately to solve the problems they caused and therein rose her conviction that it was possible for others, for everyone, when the way was opened for them.</p><p>And it is at the steps of her church that the man sat to rest.</p>
<hr/><p>“What?”</p><p>The woman—he can see that much, although she’s little more than a backlit silhouette—repeats her question. “Would you like to come in, sir?”</p><p>He stares dumbly at her. The invitation, the <em>sir</em>—he has walked miles and miles and his mouth feels fuzzy with dust, and in his coat pocket are the papers that name him parolee, dangerous, the charges of breaking and entering, of multiple assaults upon officers of the law, of attempted escapes, and here this woman, alone, is welcoming him in with a <em>sir</em>.</p><p>“It gets cold here at night, you know,” oh, he knows, he knows, “and you look in need of a meal.”</p><p>His eyes have adjusted a little to the light, and he squints at the woman. She, like many people, is taller than him, and her short ash-blonde hair curves in towards her cheeks, and she’s wearing a housecoat over a plain, high-necked nightgown, and she holds out her blunt-fingered hand to him. “Come in, please.”</p><p>He stands, mute, not touching the hand. He follows her indoors, skirting the hall with its empty pews and into the set of rooms to one side, eyes flicking to the doors and windows in case he has to—leave, suddenly. The room he is led to has not much of note: a heavy cabinet and an assortment of mismatched chairs around a table.</p><p>“Sit! Sit, please,” the woman says, pulling out a chair and gesturing. “I have already eaten, but I can keep you company while you do. I know it is not much here, but you need somewhere to stay.” The man sits warily, and his caution leaves him when the woman sets a plate in front of him: buttered dark bread and some sort of porridgey dish of oats and onions and pork, all still warm. He wolfs it down, hunched over the plate, noiseless beyond his chewing.</p><p>He’s halfway through the plate before he notices how it gleams, that it’s <em>silver</em>, that he is being fed from a silver plate on a table with silver candlesticks! Still, he feigns indifference, not difficult with half a plate of hot food in front of him.</p><p>“You have not eaten well in a long time, have you?” She asks. The man stares incredulously for a couple seconds and returns to eating. Does she think that on the chain gang they ate three meals a day?</p><p>He only looks up again when his plate is clean. The woman sits across the table from him, hands folded, smiling. “My name is Yekateryna. What is yours?”</p><p>Nobody—in so long, nobody has asked him that. “Yao,” he answers. “Yao Wang.”</p><p>She dips her head briefly, and then asks, “Forgive me, I know that sometimes your people put their names in a different order, I do not wish to assume—is your family name—”</p><p>“Wang.” His family name. Yao no longer thinks of his family, but…</p><p>“Mr. Wang, then,” Yekateryna says, and opens her mouth to say something more, and Yao’s head aches.</p><p>He cuts her off. “You know I’m a convict, right?”</p><p>She nods.</p><p>“With the papers and everything. They wouldn’t serve me at the train-stop, they threw me out.”</p><p>Yekateryna nods again, a frown passing over her face, and says “That is unfortunate. I should…I will have some words with her, tomorrow.”</p><p>This doesn’t make <em>sense</em>, and the sudden rush of anger after so long spent feeling only sullen, beaten acceptance is…is exhilarating. “Why did you let me in!?” Yao shouts—he hasn’t shouted in what feels like centuries. Some part of him never wants to stop.</p><p>“Because you were sleeping outside, when I have an extra bed. Mr. Wang, I do not know your faith, and if it is not mine, now is not the time to proselytize, but my God has said: whatever you have done for the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done for me.” She smiles. His head aches as though it’ll split open, like a rotten fruit. “You should go to bed, Mr. Wang. You must have had a long day.”</p><p>The enormity of—of all of this beats at the corners of Yao’s brain. He glances from the plate to the cabinet and back again. At the lockless door.</p><p>“All right.” He stands. “Where is it?”</p><p>He’ll think this over—later. Later, he’ll think.</p><p>Yao lies down on the bed, without even taking off his shoes, and is asleep in seconds.</p>
<hr/><p>In the night, he wakes, unused to the softness of a bed. Glancing out the small window, Yao guesses that it’s maybe half past two in the morning, and if he strains he can hear Yekateryna snoring.</p><p>Quiet as air, he slips from the bed, taking one of the blankets with him. He pauses at the door, thinking <em>maybe I shouldn’t</em>, and swiftly crushes that doubt. She invited him in, she knew the risks. Asking him his name, treating him in a way he has not known for twenty years, maybe longer, the way it would be mad to treat him now. He holds his breath anyway as he opens the door. It doesn’t squeak.</p><p>Yao makes his stealthy way across the room towards the cabinet. <em>That</em> door, the cabinet door, does squeak, like the blare of a trumpet in the silent room, and Yao freezes, half-madly expecting to be struck dead where he stands.</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>The silver service rests before his eyes, barely gleaming in the dull light of the yellow moon lancing through the window, and Yao hastily packs the plates and serving spoons into the blanket he brought with him, glancing over his shoulder every couple seconds at the door to Yekateryna’s room. There is no sound, no movement, and he half-wishes there were so she’d <em>see</em>, see she shouldn’t have let him in and called him sir and mister, fed him, given him a bed against all reason, against the papers in his coat—</p><p>He bundles the blanket shut, and slings it over his shoulder, mindless now of the muffled clanks, and runs out the back door, easily vaults the low garden wall, and makes off into the night.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. see in this some higher plan</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Yao Wang’s family came from a small village along one of the rivers that fed into the Golden Delta, a village which no longer exists. When he was still fairly young, he and his older sister Chun Yan and her new husband moved away, across the sea. Yao spent much of the voyage reading and rereading the manual that had been sent back and passed around the village, full of instructions on how to avoid the board at Moraga Island turning the three of them back around. Two days before their ship pulled in to port he threw it over the side, having some idea of what might happen if he were caught with it. Through that, and luck, and bribery, they passed through Moraga and moved down to Port Heron, then further south through Vallón to Hawi.</p><p>Hawi was a small and dusty place, a mountain town that had grown around now-dead mines. And around Hawi had grown orchards, mainly apple. And Yao Wang had grown to adulthood in those orchards; slight and agile, he could reach the high branches with ease, and between him and his sister and his brother-in-law enough money came in that they could all care for the children that began to arrive.</p><p>And then, after the fourth child, Chun Yan’s husband had left.</p><p>He’d said he was going to Vallón to see if there was any better work—and he may well have gone there, but he didn’t come back. He didn’t come back, and for a little while things still didn’t get so bad because Yao still had work in the orchards, but as soon as the apple harvest was over and the cold began to set in and the clear, dusty days became sharp-edged and short, things got bad and worse.</p><p>Yao and Chun Yan and her children lasted through that winter on whatever small work they could scrape together, but he—who had been quite loud and brash as a youth—began to draw inward. Chun Yan told him, once, that it was like someone had slammed a door behind his face and shot the bar across his mouth. As Yao ate, hunched over and moving quickly, she would sometimes lift a celery heart or a slice of meat from his bowl and slip it into that of one of her children. If he noticed, he made no sign.</p><p>The next winter was worse.</p><p>The third was worse yet.</p><p>No matter how hard Yao and Chun Yan searched, after the apple harvest there was simply no work to be had, and no work meant no food. That was a cold winter, cold and dry so that the brown grass cracked and broke underfoot and the live oak rattled in the late winds. There was no work, and there was no food, and four children to feed. They sold what they could spare, and then what they couldn’t, they ate boiled cattail root, and thistle root, and manzanita flowers, and scrawny jackrabbits and pigeons if they were lucky, and it was nowhere near enough. Yao looked out at the world through shuttered eyes.</p><p>One night, a particularly cold one, the baker of Hawi woke to the sound of splintering glass. He rushed downstairs and caught a glimpse of a bloodied hand and forearm pulling stale bread from the shattered window, and gave chase to the owner of the hand, bellowing for the police. After a few blocks, he managed to run the man down—he’d thrown aside the loaf, but his arm still freely bled.</p><p>Yao Wang was tried for breaking and entering, theft, resisting arrest, and assault upon an officer of the law, the last two for his frantic attempts to twist and kick his way free that only ended when one of the policemen slammed him to the ground. He pled guilty; the lawyer he was assigned told him to do so, told him that if he tried to fight the case there was a good chance he’d end up convicted and deported. So Yao Wang pled guilty to all charges, and was sentenced to five years on a chain gang. He was put in the chains and stripes, he was no longer Yao Wang from the Golden Delta but VL-5354, taken through to Vallón and then east over the chaparral and the mountains and the badlands, away from Hawi and Chun Yan and her children.</p><p>It was late February, and a rare heavy rain had come to the desert east of the mountains. As the train rushed Yao eastward, the bajadas and slot canyons to either side of the tracks bloomed orange and yellow and purple with tiny flowers seizing their brief chances at existence. The train car had no windows and Yao would not have looked out of them if they were there; he sat stunned and weeping, unable to speak.</p><p>He did not hear from Chun Yan or her children again. They left Hawi, and Hawi forgot them, and their home forgot them, and even Yao began to forget them. Only once did he ever hear news—Chun Yan was in Vallón, he heard near the beginning of his fourth year of the sentence. She had one child with her, a girl, the second-youngest. No word of the other three. She worked early shifts at a laundry, and the girl, no older than seven, would sit in the doorway of the building because the other workers didn’t like having her inside; she was underfoot, <em>jòeng ngoi mat</em>, they said. This is all Yao heard of them; the other prisoners talked to him of it for a day and then there was no more. He never had more information of them, never found them again. They were swallowed without a trace.</p><p>By the end of his fourth year on the chain gang, his chance came to escape. The rest of the prisoners assisted him as best they could, and for two days he was free. Free, in the sense that a small hunted animal is free, always looking over his shoulder at the red desert, afraid of everything—the slide of stones beneath a snake, the whirr of quail and towhee, the night, the day. At the end of the second day, when he was recaptured, he had not slept for a day and a half at least, and for this he had three years added to his sentence—eight years, in all.</p><p>In the sixth year of his sentence, he tried again, not exactly out of hope to succeed (ground down by the sun, the work, the heat, and in any case where would he go?) but simply out of some primeval instinct, and when he was found that night he tried to fight the guard. Escape and another count of assault upon an officer of the law—five years added to his sentence. Thirteen. The tenth year, he tried again, and received three more years—sixteen.</p><p>The chain gang had moved around some in this time, as their work—track for a new railroad line, rock for a new road—changed, but still the red desert stretched around them, wind-carved, full of rock and brush and tiny tufts of scrub grass, and the sun hammered down out of a white sky like beaten metal.</p><p>Yao made one last attempt in the thirteenth year of his sentence. He knew it was futile, and something screamed in his head over and over that he <em>had</em> to, he <em>had</em> to, he <em>had</em> to. He was retaken after four hours. Three years added again, for those four hours.</p><p>In May, nineteen years after Yao Wang, VL-5354, was arrested for breaking a window and stealing a loaf of bread, he was released. They put him on a train to Port Heron, in an old suit and under guard. They told him that in two months he had to show himself at Alila, or he’d be breaking parole. When Yao Wang was put on that train, he had not cried in nineteen years.</p>
<hr/><p>Over those nineteen years, between the work, the pitiless sun and the pitiless guards, the vast red desert, Yao hardened as his hands hardened from the pick and his face from the wind. During the rests they received, Yao would think, eyes narrowed against the glare, formless hat pulled low over his face, sweat-soaked prison stripes clinging to his back, the chain fixed around his ankle and calf.</p><p>Yao Wang put himself on trial.</p><p>He had committed a crime; definitely he had committed a crime. It may even have been needlessly done—how many people died of hunger, specifically of hunger? Few. He could have waited, and now he was gone, so weren’t Chun Yan’s children worse off for it?</p><p>But should he have <em>had</em> to? Should he have lacked bread, and been punished for it, so relentlessly and unceasingly; was that punishment not so much that it not only obliterated but reversed the crime, perpetrating its own for nineteen years without pause? Yao thought: if there is crime here, it is not mine, yet I can do nothing about it. Within him, he nourished and whetted an enormous, formless anger, and he fed himself on it. A couple of the other prisoners taught him to read and write more than he already knew, and he learned this out of anger. Knowledge of his motivation—of further motivation—burned steadily out of him beneath that sun, like an over-exposed photograph. If anyone had asked him <em>why</em> he kept trying to escape, knowing there was no hope of success, he would not have been able to tell them. A man caught like a beast, worked like a beast, chained like a beast would run like one.</p><p>The guard with him on the train to Port Heron had at least a head and a half of height on Yao, blond hair and blue eyes and glasses. He slouched in his seat, whistling loudly from time to time, facing Yao with one hand not quite next to the holster on his hip. Yao thinks he might remember him, vaguely, from among the chain-gang guards, but all of them have blurred together into one figure, astride a horse, holding a gun.</p><p>“Right,” the guard had said as the train wheezed and slowed. “You’re on parole now.”</p><p>Yao nodded slowly.</p><p>“For life.”</p><p>Yao could only stare. How much life did they think he had left? “<em>Life</em>?”</p><p>The guard shrugged a shoulder. “Yep. Seems about what you deserve, to me.”</p><p>Carefully schooling his voice into a low monotone, Yao replied, “It was one loaf of bread.”</p><p>“Breaking and entering, repeated escape attempts, some violent. Like I said, no more than you deserve. And you’ll want to watch that backchat.” Something rose in Yao’s throat, and the guard stared back, blue eyes guileless. “I really hope you’ve learned your lesson, though seeing how much you ran I kinda doubt it myself. Ain’t for me to say, though.” The train juddered to its final stop. “Free to go, Vee-El-Five-Three-Five-Four.”</p><p>One of Yao’s hands clenched minutely at the way the guard drew out every syllable. “<em>Yao Wang</em>.”</p><p>The guard lifted his chin. “Jones, Alfred F. Officer.” He waved his hand shortly. “Free to go. Best remember me, especially if you’re planning on running again, ‘cause I’m faster.” And then he frowned, seemingly more from confusion than anything else. “Free to <em>go</em>, I said, don’t you listen?”</p><p>Yao went.</p>
<hr/><p>And so.</p><p>In the morning, when the sun is still weak, there comes a knocking on the side door of Yekateryna’s church. She is already awake, and has been for several hours.</p><p>“Found your silver,” says one of the officers when she opens the door, and the other adds “Caught him with it ‘bout a mile outta town.” Yao stands—sways, rather—between them, hands cuffed behind his back, a large bruise already coloring his face. He eyes Yekateryna with dull defiance. <em>See</em>, he thinks. <em>See</em>.</p><p>The first officer holds out the blanket full of silver to her. “He had the b—the guts to say you gave him this.” He tightens his other hand on Yao’s arm and does not move his blunt, sunburned face from Yekateryna. There is a sort of good humor dancing in his eyes. Yao curls his fists behind his back.</p><p>She smiles. “I did.” Both officers go silent, glancing at each other for a second. “And, friend, why did you leave these behind?” Yekateryna steps quickly to the table and picks up the heavy candlesticks. “They are well worth having.”</p><p>Yao stares at her, unblinking, disbelieving. Is she <em>insane</em>? The officers stare as well. One opens his mouth a fraction, then claps it shut.</p><p>“You—so he—he wasn’t lying,” says the first officer.</p><p>Yekateryna shakes her head, just once, and the officers uncuff Yao and hastily depart with a “Sorry to bother you, Mother Chernenko.” Slowly, shakily, Yao reaches out and takes the proffered candlesticks in hand. Well worth having—well, she wasn’t lying, they weigh enough to be silver all the way through. When Yao pulls his gaze from them, the only place it can go is Yekateryna’s face.</p><p>She steps close to him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and says lowly, “Mr. Wang. You are going to sell all of this, and whatever you do with that money, you must do honestly.” He remains speechless, mouth more parched than it ever was on the chain-gang, and Yekateryna Chernenko fixes her eyes on his and continues. “Remember that. Whatever and whoever you believe in, you have promised to it that you will use that money to become honest. I may have bought your soul, but it is for you to keep it.”</p><p>Yao does not answer—he thinks he might nod, but he can’t tell—and his knees tremble as though they will give out any second. The candlesticks are heavy in his hands.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The Golden Delta is based off the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong Province, where a huge amount of the pre-WWII Chinese diaspora came from.</p><p>Moraga Island is based off of Angel Island, an immigration station in San Francisco Bay. It was where most Pacific immigrants were processed, and because of endemic and institutionalized anti-Asian (and specifically anti-Chinese) racism, the process was a lot tougher than at Ellis Island—many more would-be immigrants were deported from Angel Island, most of whom were Chinese, because of extremely strict immigration controls. Successful Chinese immigrants would in fact write manuals to send back to China about how to pass the examinations. It’s named after José Joaquín Moraga, who founded the city of San José.</p><p>Hawi is loosely based on Julian; its name comes from the Kumeyaay name for the ghost town of Vallecito.</p><p>You can eat the plants Yao and his family are reduced to eating, but nobody does it for the taste.</p><p>5354: an unlucky number—五三五四, ńg sāam ńg sei, sounds like 唔生唔死, m̀ sāang m̀ séi, “not alive, not dead”.</p><p>jòeng ngoi mat: 障礙物, a stumbling block.</p><p>In real life, chain gangs in the United States were mostly restricted to the South, and were comprised mainly of black prisoners, which should be fairly unsurprising. There is in general a long American history of using prisoners as forced labor after the Civil War—in California more recently, for instance, as firefighters during wildfire season. It’s not good! <i>Thirteenth</i> by Ava DuVernay is a good introduction to the whole topic, and I think it’s still on Netflix?</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. what spirit comes to move my life</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Yao Wang fairly flees Joshua Flat, northward along the road to Alila. He does not slow for at least three miles, and then continues walking, until the silver in the bag on his back grows too heavy. When Joshua Flat is the barest smudge on the horizon, wavering in the heat, he sets the bag on the side of the road and sits down next to it, stirring a small cloud of grit and dust as he does.</p><p>He shudders, though the heat is baking across his back.</p><p>What has he done?</p><p>The object of the prison: break the prisoner, bear them down beneath the weight of the chain, the guards, the lost years, the unending work. To grab the prisoner and twist until there is nothing left, and declare it punishment and recompense both, the prisoner making themselves useful in repentance of their criminality, emptied out to be filled with the good of society, for the profit of society. A process of emptying that does leave things behind, in the desperate coyotes it makes of man. It left Yao hate.</p><p>Yao Wang was left hate. Hate for the guards, for the judge and jury, for himself for allowing his transformation into a man who would steal from those who offered him shelter, for the world that had battered him down and devoured his sister and nieces and nephews.</p><p>Yao Wang was left hate, and it churns inside his belly, hot as the sticky asphalt of the road to Alila and leaving the same acrid stench of tar in his nostrils. Something else also rolls in his stomach—guilt and fear and regret knotted into a ball that pulls and pulls and pulls at his insides.</p><p>What has he <em>done</em>?</p><p>Yekateryna Chernenko had every right and reason to turn him back over to the officers. She had taken Yao in, against all good sense, and he had repaid her with theft, the only thing that made <em>sense</em> was for her to turn him in, back to the chain-gang to lose whatever of himself was still left.</p><p>She had shown him kindness, had <em>trusted</em> him—<em>him</em>—and why? The words kindness, trust—Yao almost has to clutch his own head as he thinks them. They don’t belong in the same sentence as himself, anymore. The look in her eyes as she spoke to him, he doesn’t think anyone’s looked at him like that in…in nineteen years. Thoughts of his family had been a wound, and now were a scar through which he had thought nothing would penetrate, but something had tugged at that scar when she looked in his eyes.</p><p><em>Become honest</em>, she had said. Yao doesn’t know if he can, if the chain-gang had left that in him. If anything in him could ever turn now from the red desert and white sun and guards on horseback as they broke rocks and laid roads. If there is any way out from this, from what he is now, on parole where nobody would extend a hand.</p><p>Yet Yekateryna had.</p><p>How did she know if he even could? Right now, Yao could stand back up and take the bag of silver and sell it, and that money would last for a while, and then it would run out, and nobody would hire a man like him with a record like his. And what then? Stealing, again, for nobody but himself, for no reason but to live, and then the chain-gang until nothing was left. What made her think that Yao Wang could ever escape from this, from the whole world become that desert?</p><p>The sun climbs higher in the hazy sky, and the wind shifts until it carries, amid the cow dung, the smell of creosote from the foothills. Yao narrows his eyes against the glare, thoughts chasing themselves through his head.</p><p>The chain gang had taken Yao Wang, changed and twisted him—and Yao Wang had stolen from Yekateryna, which seemed to him now to be the greatest possible crime—and Yao Wang would steal, would continue to be forced to steal and to steal when there was no force except for the fact of the papers in his pocket and his own knowledge that that was what Yao Wang was, and the only way out—</p><p>—the only way out was for Yao Wang to be gone.</p><p>Without realizing it, he’d taken the papers from his pocket, and now he stares at them, hands steady in their grip. “Parole for life,” he reads, and “dangerous convict”. Yao bows his head and lets out a long and near-silent sigh.</p><p>Two days later, a young ranch-hand who sits on the back of the rattling truck that drives them all up to Axel sees, amid the cloud of dust raised by its wheels, several scraps of yellowy paper fluttering in the early sun. He thinks it odd at first, but by the time the truck reaches Axel he decides they must have blown out of someone’s car the last night, and does not think on it further.</p><p> </p><p>end of book one</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. (Book II: Efrosyni) il le faut, disait un guerrier</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Efrosyni Katsafanas: Ancient Greece<br/>Aurelio de Campo: Ancient Rome<br/>Marianne Vermeulen: F!France<br/>Orianne Vermeulen: Belgium<br/>Victoire Vermeulen: Monaco<br/>Timothy ‘Tims’ Vermeulen: Netherlands</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>By the end of her life, Efrosyni Katsafanas will have hated two men more than she ever thought she could have hated anyone or anything.</p><p>The second, she hasn’t met yet. The first: Aurelio de Campo. <em>Fucking</em> Aurelio de Campo, who glided through life like an otter playing through the stream, young and wealthy and never actually convinced that other people <em>existed</em> on the inside, thought different than him, had different <em>lives</em> than he did instead of just vanishing whenever he left the room, when he left the hotel room empty before she came in and the only concessions to his presence were the little note that read <em>Don’t worry, I paid for the dinner</em> and the child that Efrosyni had found was growing in her belly.</p><p>She had already sort of hated him then, and she has had almost three years to sharpen and whet that hate. It snarls at the bottom of Efrosyni’s empty stomach as she leans against the side wall of the Mowich King Launderette, rubbing the side of her aching foot through her shoe. Still asleep, Feliciano rests against her shoulder, arms curled loosely around her neck; though small even for his age, he is heavy enough to make her arm ache. She sets down her carpetbag, trying and failing to shake a little of the soreness out of her other arm.</p><p>Before her, the town of Mowich goes about its ten A.M. weekday business under a sky moist and gray-white with clouds. Business that has no room for her, with such a young son and no ring on her finger, business that tells her, get you gone, the bus west to Langless and Hayhurst and Memaloose comes in an hour and then not again for a week. A week that, if Efrosyni waits it out, she’ll be spending sleeping rough in two days. Three, if she doesn’t eat.</p><p>Feliciano stirs and settles. Soft hands, soft breath, already talking—he could chatter the leg off a table, when he’s awake. Aurelio was the same, but Efrosyni prefers to think that it came from her, that when he’s older he’ll be a debater, he’ll have the time and money and peace of mind to read philosophers and argue about them all day like she once longed to do, he’ll have…</p><p>…the chances she can’t give him. The pension program won’t take her, not even if she stays in Sitkum County. She can put herself through a lot, but not him.</p><p>Efrosyni hefts her carpetbag again, careful not to jostle the child, and begins walking back towards the bus station. Her restlessness since the dawn has led her circuitously throughout Mowich, and the King Launderette is almost at its edge where it crumbles into the damp, black pine forest.</p><p>She can’t take care of Feliciano, not any longer, not in Mowich. God knows she’s tried. And the work out west—she knows there <em>is</em> work, and it’ll be work for girls who are…clean. Trustworthy. <em>Good</em> girls who don’t have someone to hate as much as Efrosyni utterly loathes Aurelio de Campo, girls who did not <em>let themselves be led astray</em> or who at least can hide that they were. Efrosyni, teeth clenched against the strain in her arms and the curse in her throat, hooks a left back out into the street and casts a last look towards the forest.</p><p>What she sees next stops her in her tracks.</p><p>There’s a roadhouse, some two and a half stories high, sign proclaiming it the “Chipilly Spur”—in itself, not terribly impressive, she’d passed it by before. The detached and rusting truck bed by it, a scattered remnant of the wartime spruce logging raised up on blocks, is nothing special either. And maybe even the two children playing by it wouldn’t be, except for Feliciano in Efrosyni’s arms and the bus due in an hour. Both children have white-blond hair like dandelion clocks, the younger one (a baby, really) held in the older one’s lap and the older one precariously balanced on the thick rope tied to the truck bed’s hitch that serves as a swing. Its other end is tied to the massive, decrepit winch that’s rusted in place extending past the truck bed. The winch, looming like some arcane gallows, groans with every swing of the rope; neither child is old enough to swing on their own, and the woman sitting by them occasionally gives them a push. At each swing, and groan, and shower of rust flakes, the children squeal with laughter.</p><p>Efrosyni swallows. She takes a half-step forwards and then turns on her heel, marching back towards the King Launderette and Mowich proper, chest consuming itself. <em>This is your son</em>, she tells herself, <em>your </em>son, your <em>son</em>. And yet. And yet.</p><p>Her stomach growls, and that settles the matter.</p><p>As she approaches the roadhouse again, it’s as if her ears become magnitudes more sensitive—the chirr and whistle of birds in the forest, the way the rope grits against the truck hitch where it’s knotted, the hiss of steam from the launderette, all picked out in detail sharp as knives. The woman is singing quietly through her teeth: “<em>Le mien n’est pas de même, la belle m’a dondaine</em>...” The crunch of Efrosyni’s footsteps resounds in her ears, and for a second she wonders why they haven’t jarred Feliciano awake. “<em>Il est bien affligé, la belle m’a, lalala</em>…”</p><p>She stops a couple yards away, observing the woman and her two children as if through a pane of glass, as if they’re a diorama. Any closer, she thinks, and she will be taken notice of. Close enough to be taken notice of is too far to return. Another round of laughter from the children.</p><p>She takes another step forward.</p><p>She clears her throat and, surprising herself with the volume of her voice, Efrosyni says, “You—you have beautiful children, ma’am.”</p><p>“<em>Bien affligé, la belle m’a dondé</em>,” the woman finishes, turning her head to meet Efrosyni’s gaze with a vague interest. “Ah…thank you.” Efrosyni is extremely aware of the sorry state of her own clothing, slept in for days on end, no way to hide the run in her stocking, and beneath her kerchief her scalp fairly itches with the need to wash her hair. She stares back at the woman’s washed-out blue eyes.</p><p>“Will you sit?” asks the woman, jerking her head towards the stoop.</p><p>Efrosyni does. “Thank you, ma’am,” she says, stretching out her calves one at a time.</p><p>“Hm,” the woman says. “I’m Mrs. Vermeulen,” Efrosyni does not fail to catch the slight emphasis on <em>Mrs.</em>, “and we,” with a tilt of the shoulder towards the roadhouse, indicating the Mr. Vermeulen presumably within, “run this place. I don’t think I’ve seen you around before…?”</p><p>“No, no,” Efrosyni says hastily. “I haven’t been in Mowich very long, and I couldn’t very well go out, my son is too young to be left alone.”</p><p>“Nobody to watch him?” Mrs. Vermeulen’s face doesn’t move.</p><p>Efrosyni tries not to visibly wince. “His father died,” oh, she wished, “and I left the town we’d lived in, and I don’t…know anyone here who I could ask.”</p><p>“Well,” Mrs. Vermeulen says, “I’m sorry to hear that.”</p><p>In her arms, Feliciano stirs, and then opens his eyes and starts wriggling to be let down. When he has a mind to be put down, he’s fairly unstoppable, so Efrosyni kisses the top of his head and lets him go, for a second not even <em>thinking</em>—and then her arms feel so strange afterwards, and she will not throw herself into useless self-pity for even one second. She <em>will not</em>. Feliciano makes a beeline for the swing, stops in front of it, and sticks his tongue out. After a second, the older of the two children on it returns the gesture.</p><p>Mrs. Vermeulen stands, dislodges her children from the swing, and says, “Have fun, you three. <em>Fifilles, soyez fines</em>.” The three children approach each other cautiously and then set to playing in the grass, digging little holes with every apparent pleasure, the two older ones minding the baby. Both women watch them as they continue talking.</p><p>“So, your boy, how old is he?” Mrs. Vermeulen asks.</p><p>“Just about three.”</p><p>“A bit younger than my eldest, then,” she says. “That’s Orianne, and then Victoire, the youngest.” She pauses, and Efrosyni notes the sidelong look. “Yours is…?”</p><p>“Feliciano. His name’s Feliciano.”</p><p>“That’s an odd one. Italian, then?”</p><p>“His father was. My parents were from Skala, in Laconia.” Efrosyni had wrestled with herself over Feliciano’s name—she’d had other ones picked out, Greek ones, Agapios after one uncle, or Elias after a grandfather, but had thought that maybe she didn’t want to <em>ignore</em> Aurelio so much as <em>overwrite</em> him, and after Feliciano was born she’d held him, looking like nothing so much as a big raisin with hair, and thought <em>I know exactly what I want for him</em> and, and if Efrosyni keeps thinking about this she won’t be able to stand up. She squeezes her eyes shut and hopes that maybe to Mrs. Vermeulen it’ll pass as grief for this dead father, or for missing her parents. “And yours…you don’t sound French, but?”</p><p>Mrs. Vermeulen leans back. “No. Baie-Ste.-Lucie, way out in Monckton province. Full herringchoker, me, which I think must have helped me attract Tims—Mr. Vermeulen—I was a nurse, you see, in the war, and we bonded over our love of the finer things, such as small raw fish.” She smiles, and Efrosyni can see a sort of scoured, sandy beauty in her. “Would you look at those children, they could be brother and sisters…”</p><p>An opening. Efrosyni plunges ahead. “Would you—ma’am, I know this is—sudden, but would you…watch him for me?”</p><p>Mrs. Vermeulen’s eyebrows shoot up into her dark blonde hair.</p><p>“I said I wasn’t in Mowich for long, and I can’t be for much longer—I’m going west, to the coast, to look for work, I heard the canneries are hiring, but…you understand, with a child, and without a husband, I can’t…” Efrosyni stamps out the whine that’s trying to creep into her voice. It’s childish, and she <em>cannot</em> have it. “People…make assumptions, ma’am. Like landlords, and bosses. They make assumptions about…about what kind of woman you are, and then if you say to them that it’s not true, they don’t listen, because the kind of woman they think you are is the kind who would lie about it. So I can’t have him with me while I’m looking for work, you see, but once I’m settled I can, I can send for him and pass him off as my little cousin.” Efrosyni sets her jaw and shoulders. “It would only be until I got myself settled, ma’am. Please.”</p><p>Mrs. Vermeulen lets out a long <em>hmm-mph</em> through her nose. “Well, I’ll have to see about that.”</p><p>Efrosyni swallows and does some math in her head. “I can pay you. Five dollars a month?”</p><p>A man shouts from the depths of the roadhouse, “Six at least, and six months’ advance,” followed by even footsteps.</p><p>“Which makes thirty-six dollars.” That sidelong look from Mrs. Vermeulen’s heart-shaped face. Efrosyni nods, transfixed.</p><p>The footsteps reach the door, and Efrosyni finds herself being loomed over by an enormously tall, rangy man with sandy brown hair. If smells could loom as well, the scent of tobacco would be equal to the man in height and breadth. Mr. Vermeulen, she thinks. Tims. Who barely opens his mouth to say “And then, I think, twelve for preliminary costs. Beds don’t come for nothing, Marianne.”</p><p>“Forty-eight dollars, then,” says Marianne, and she hums another bar of her song—<em>Pierre, mon ami Pierre, la belle…</em></p><p>Spitting fury rears its head in Efrosyni’s mind, and she reins it back. <em>Did you think they’d do this for free?</em> She asks herself. <em>Out of the goodness of their own hearts? That kind of thinking is—is what got you in the mess with Aurelio to begin with. You can’t afford it. You cannot afford, </em>literally<em>, to think that way</em>. She looks at Feliciano, who is industriously pulling up grass and piling it between himself and Orianne. She stands up. Efrosyni Katsafanas may hand her only son to strangers, but she will not be loomed at by those strangers.</p><p>“Forty-eight dollars,” she repeats to the couple. “Done.” Leaving barely enough for her to get on and off the bus. The bus which she can’t miss. How long has it been? She trains her eyes on the Vermeulens, will not let them drift to Feliciano. She reaches for her carpetbag, the wallet in it.</p><p>Mrs. Vermeulen—Marianne—looks at Feliciano, and for a second Efrosyni wants to tear the woman’s eyes out. <em>Her</em> son! <em>Hers</em>! “Has he got clothes?”</p><p>“Of course he does!” Efrosyni barely manages not to snap the sentence. What kind of mother do they think she is, that she hasn’t got any clothes for her son but what’s on his back? The answer to that question comes too easily for her. “He does. They’re in the bag, ma’am.” She swallows. “You’ll be wanting them, I guess?”</p><p>Mr. Vermeulen nods.</p><p>She digs them out of the bag, hands them over in their little folded pile with the forty-eight dollars on top. Mrs. Vermeulen takes the clothes, Efrosyni lets the fabric drag over her hands as they are taken. They’re not much, nothing fancy, and a little big for Feliciano besides, but they’re good. They serve.</p><p>And that’s it. She tells herself, he’ll be safe. Orianne and Victoire look so well-cared-for, after all. He’ll have a roof over his head and food on the table, and then once she can do that for him without getting evicted or fired for loose morals, she’ll come back for him. He’ll be safe. That’s what she can do for him. Maybe, if everything goes well, she can even get some of that six months’ payment back from the Vermeulens. Efrosyni lets herself hold on to that fantasy: coming back for Feliciano in five months, four, three, two, taking him home, having a home to take him to. The future rolling out before them like a stream.</p><p>Efrosyni takes a step backwards, carpetbag held demurely in front of her with both hands, and inclines her head to the couple. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll write to you—please read the letters to him, too, if you have the time.”</p><p>Feliciano isn’t looking. Efrosyni aches to go to him, pick him up, kiss him one last time. Tell him she’ll come back. <em>Running off when your child’s back is turned</em>, comes a voice from the depths of her head. <em>Maybe you’d like to leave him a note? Maybe about the dinner bill?</em></p><p>No. No, no, no, no, <em>no</em>, this is <em>nothing</em> like—! She knows <em>exactly</em> what she is doing, and she would give anything in the world to not have to be doing it, and Efrosyni also knows that if she lays even one finger on Feliciano now she will grab him and run and not let go, not ever. And in the short term, she would have Feliciano, and then in a week she’d be exactly where she is now, but with no money at all. Better—like this. Better to imagine, again, that what she’s looking at is a diorama, behind glass. She can’t touch it.</p><p>She bunches her shoulders against the strain of the carpetbag and turns down the road, back to Mowich proper, back to the bus stop. To Langless and Hayhurst and Memaloose and points west. Efrosyni feels the eyes of the Vermeulens burning holes in her back, from inside the diorama. She passes the rusted truck bed, the three children playing beneath it, absorbed entirely in their own world.</p><p><em>Eis to epanideín</em>, she mouths to herself. <em>Pouláki mou, eis to epanideín</em>.</p><p>And as Efrosyni gets on the bus, hot tears falling from her eyes (someone will go to the Chipilly Spur that evening and tell Timothy Vermeulen across the bar, <em>Saw the damnedest thing at the bus stop, some girl just crying as if her heart would break</em>), she hates Aurelio de Campo more than anything else in the entire world.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>The chapter title is a c-c-c-combo breaker, but I didn’t want to make it too long, and Fantine’s separation from Cosette isn’t in the musical, so this chapter’s title comes from the song that Mme. Thénardier is singing when Fantine comes to Montfermeil.</p><p>Le mien n’est pas de même…: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuMwisT_5PU">Au bord de la fontaine, la belle m’a dondaine.</a></p><p>Fifilles, soyez fines: Girls, be nice (fin is Québécois—European French would use gentil. Marianne is from the AU-Maritimes and would be speaking Acadien instead of Québécois, but shh.)</p><p>Eis to epanideín, pouláki mou: Until we meet again, little one.</p><p>If there is a place called Baie-Ste.-Lucie, hopefully it will forgive me; Skala is an actual town in Laconia, one of the administrative regions of Greece, which will hopefully forgive me as well. Robert Monckton was an English officer and colonial administrator whose capture of Ft. Beauséjour was a turning point in the 7 Years’ War in Canada and laid the groundwork for the foundation of New Brunswick as an English-dominated province. A “herringchoker” is someone from New Brunswick, on account of all the herring (of which the Dutch also happen to be fond). In the Battle of Amiens in 1918, the Chipilly Spur (a ridge near the small village of Chipilly, commanded by German artillery) was taken by Australian forces on the second day of the battle.</p><p>A note on locations: I struggled with whether or not to change the names of absolutely everywhere, Greece and Italy included, but decided against it because it would probably be kind of annoying, and hope that it won’t break immersion too badly, if I’ve managed to cause any immersion in the first place. And, you know, that things like “f!France is from cod-New Brunswick now” don’t break it either.</p><p>On prices: I spent a long time messing around with currency converters and doing bad math on post-it notes before deciding to just tack everything onto bread prices. In 1820, a 1kg loaf of bread was about 30-35 centimes, so the 6 francs a month that Fantine offered to pay the Thenardiers to keep Cosette would’ve got her 20 kilograms of bread; in 1920, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average price of a pound of bread was 11.5¢, which works out to 23¢ per kilogram (using my not-yet-failed UK grocery store conversion of “500 grams is close enough to one pound that it won’t destroy this recipe”), and thus 20 kilograms of bread for $4.60, which I bumped to the five dollars that Efrosyni offers to pay because a kilogram is really a little more than 2 pounds and round numbers are convenient. For future reference, do not actually try this as a solid economic comparison for anything more important than fanfiction.</p>
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